Planning Democracy , livre ebook

NIKHIL MENON

PLANNING DEMOCRACY
How A Professor, An Institute, and An Idea Shaped India
PENGUIN BOOKS

PENGUIN BOOKS
Contents
Introduction
I. DATA
1. A Nation in Numbers
2. Calcutta Conquers Delhi
3. Chasing Computers
II. DEMOCRACY?
4. Help the Plan-Help Yourself
5. Salvation in Service
Epilogue
Notes
Select Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Follow Penguin
Copyright
Advance Praise for the Book
Written with wit and energy, impeccably well-researched, Planning Democracy makes a bold new contribution to our understanding of the Indian state after 1947. Menon s is the best history we have of India s great experiment with statistics-a data-driven attack on social and economic inequality that aimed, not always successfully, to be compatible with participatory democracy. Menon combines intellectual and institutional history to make a compelling case that we should focus less on whether planning succeeded or failed , in any narrow sense, and more on the profound ways it shaped India s political imagination. This excellent book is sure to find a wide and appreciative audience across disciplines. -Sunil Amrith, Dhawan Professor of History, Yale University
Planning Democracy is an important contribution to the growing literature on the history of India since Independence. The book elegantly blends biography and history, exploring how a group of politicians and scholars once made the idea of planning central to the Indian Republic. The author has skilfully mined a wide array of primary sources, and his pen portraits are particularly well done. -Ramachandra Guha, author of India After Gandhi: The History of the World s Largest Democracy
An engaging account of independent India s intertwined experiments with planning and democracy. If the setting up of India s data infrastructure forms the kernel of the early history of planning, the story of how popular culture was mobilized to propagate the plan illuminates the early tensions in building a secular democracy. -Niraja Gopal Jayal, Centennial Professor, London School of Economics and Political Science
This book will help us rethink how planning for development took hold in India s democratic imagination. Its fresh research delves into two neglected aspects of the planning process in India in the fifties. The first is the creation of a world-class institutional base for statistics by the formidable figure of Mahalanobis. It also looks at ingenious attempts at enlisting everything from Sadhus to Bollywood in publicizing Five-Year Plans. It is a refreshing look at how the discourse of development was constituted. -Pratap Bhanu Mehta, author of The Burden of Democracy
For Amma, Achan and Nitya
Introduction
The recently elected Prime Minister of India addressed the nation from the sandstone ramparts of Red Fort in Delhi, his turban s long trail flapping in the dry, dusty summer breeze. It was Independence Day 2014 and Narendra Modi s debut on this storied stage. With the Mughal fort s soaring minarets as a backdrop, Jama Masjid s giant white marble dome looming to his left and the Indian flag fluttering overhead, he put to rest months of rumour. The leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party confirmed what the public had suspected-the end was near for India s long experiment with economic planning. The curtain was coming down on the Planning Commission, an institution that had once been the beating heart of the country s economy.
Born the same year, Modi and the Planning Commission shared another milestone together. In his first Independence Day address as India s leader, Modi declared that the Planning Commission had once merited its place and made significant contributions. Now, however, he believed it had decayed beyond repair. Sometimes it costs a lot to repair an old house, he said, but it gives us no satisfaction. Afterwards we realize that we might as well build a new house , Modi explained with a smile. 1 He would build it by bulldozing a decrepit structure and raising a shiny new one, the NITI Aayog (National Institution for Transforming India).
Sixty-four years earlier, days after the inauguration of the Republic, President Rajendra Prasad delivered a speech in Parliament. The thickly moustached veteran of the Congress Party declared on 31 January 1950 that the primary objective of his government would be to raise standards of living. In order to do so, he announced, It is my government s intention to establish a Planning Commission so that the best use can be made of such resources as we possess for the development of the nation. 2 The Planning Commission was born.
The Indian planning project was one of the postcolonial world s most ambitious experiments. It was an arranged marriage between Soviet-inspired economic planning and Western-style liberal democracy, at a time when the Cold War portrayed them as ideologically contradictory and institutionally incompatible. With each Five-Year Plan, the Planning Commission set the course for the nation s economy. The ambit ranged from matters broad (free trade or protectionism?) to narrow (how much fish should fisheries produce to ensure protein in the national diet?). The Commission s pronouncements set the gears of government in motion. Shaping entire sectors of the economy through incentives, disincentives and decree, the Planning Commission s views rippled across the land to every farm and factory. Despite this awesome power, economic planning in India was considerably different from the kind practised in communist regimes. The Planning Commission was reined in by democratic procedure that required consultation with ministries in an elected government, with people s representatives in Parliament-and ultimately with the popular will-through citizens voting every five years.
During the formative decades of the republic, the urge to plan governed the nation. It was the vehicle chosen for rapid economic transformation after nearly two centuries of colonial rule, and it also became the language through which the government s aspirations for democratic state-building were expressed. It was a staple of national conversation and Five-Year Plans marked the calendar of governance. Politicians seldom tired of invoking the Plans, while the media dutifully reported on their progress. They were debated in civil society, and citizens found themselves called to work ever more energetically toward the Plan s success.
As India emerged from generations of colonial rule in 1947, it faced the following question: would life be any better for 35,00,00,000 Indians? Dr Bhimrao Ambedkar-arch critic of caste and architect of the constitution-articulated the fear that was on the minds of many. In his last speech to the Constituent Assembly in late 1949, Ambedkar warned that India was about to enter a life of contradictions . In politics we will have equality, he said, and in social and economic life we will have inequality. These conflicts demanded attention: fail to do so, and those denied, will blow up the structure of political democracy . 3 The Indian government seemingly agreed, at least about the economy. The First Five-Year Plan noted that the international context made planning not only compatible with democracy, but essential for its very survival . 4
The Indian drama had the world watching. Files from the British Foreign Office and the American State Department reveal that they too shared Ambedkar s fear. The fledgling nation was widely believed to be doomed. The extraordinary challenges posed by India s diversity and poverty appeared insurmountable. The ugly orgy of ethnic violence and sectarian nationalism that erupted during Partition seemed a dark omen. Predictions ranged from India splintering into smaller nations to believing it was on the brink of going Red under the malevolent influence of Mao s China or Stalin s Soviet Union. There was speculation that it was ripe for authoritarian takeover. Seen from Washington, D.C. and the capitals of Western Europe, the peril was not just to democracy in India, but also to the viability of democracy globally. If breathless columns in the New York Times are to be believed, the fate of democracy in Asia hung in the balance. India was a Bastion Against Communism and the Best Hope of Democracy in the Far East . Mao s China and Nehru s India were locked in a battle of Communist Dictatorship versus Democratic Freedom . 5 Reflecting on his visit to India, Martin Luther King Jr wrote from Chicago that it would be a boon to democracy if one of the great nations of the world could provide for its people without surrendering to a dictatorship of either the right or left . 6 In New Delhi, the influential director of the Ford Foundation in India, Douglas Ensminger, noted in a confidential staff document that the world has anxiously watched India s experiences in planning and executing its plans through democratic means . 7 Writing for The Observer in Britain, Thomas Balogh-an Oxford economist who later entered the House of Lords-described India s Experiment in stark terms. His prediction was that it may become crucial for the future of the free world . The Indian government was trying to modernize a vast, materially backward country through consent-to achieve democratically what had hitherto been undertaken, on a comparable scale, only by Communist dictatorships . 8 Confronting similar afflictions, the eyes of decolonizing Asia and Africa anxiously tracked India s moves.
Planning was meant to resolve what Ambedkar had called a life of contradictions by providing Indians with parity in their political and economic freedoms. Jawaharlal Nehru recognized the tension between the two, but he believed they could be eased through planning. Planning, though inevitably bringing about a great deal of control and co-ordination and interfering in some measure with individual freedom, would, as a matter of fact, in the context of India today, lead to a vast increase of freedom.